When gun scholar John Lott met Barack Obama for the first time in 1996, he said Obama told him, “I don’t believe that people should be able to own guns.”

Lott and Obama were both at the University of Chicago Law School “where Obama was a part-time lecturer” when the future president reportedly made that statement.

And as Lott points out on PolitZette, the statement really encapsulates the way Obama has conducted himself in political office.

For example:

During his time in Illinois state politics, Obama supported a “ban [on] the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns,” a “ban [on] the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons.” He was on the board of directors of the left-wing Joyce Foundation, which funded such anti-gun groups as the Violence Policy Center, the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence, and Handgun Free America.
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When Obama spoke to BBC last week he stressed his frustration over not being able to secure more gun control and suggested that the guns outweigh terrorism as a threat to Americans’ safety.

Obama’s exact words: “If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands.”

On July 20, disabled veteran Jim Young stood guard outside a Guntersville, Alabama, Marine recruiting office as part of his “patriotic duty.”

Young stood outside the office for approximately three hours.

According to 48 WAFF, Young said, “I felt it was my patriotic duty to make sure nothing happened to them. I can’t see them giving their life back here in the United States because someone wouldn’t arm them.”

Young’s wife also spoke to WAFF, telling them how proud she was of her husband. She said, “Jim takes his responsibility to serve as serious today as he did when he volunteered for Vietnam in 1970.”

During a July 16 nighttime appearance of Al Jazeera’s America Tonight, Colonel Gary Anderson, USMC (Ret.), said the Chattanooga attack is a reminder that Americans need to be armed because an armed citizenry “is probably the only way you can truly deter the kinds of things that we saw in the church in Charleston and that we saw… in Chattanooga.”

Col. Anderson said that if he were in charge, he “would advocate that every shop owner in America be required to not only have a gun, but know how to use it in self-defense.” He suggested that if others plan to carry out attacks like the one in Chattanooga, the way to stop them is to be sure they meet armed resistance.
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On July 15 Nip/Tuck actress Kelly Carlson said she owns a firearm for self-defense and that she was raised in a family that believed laws should punish criminals rather than guns.

Carlson told Fox & Friends that she “bought a gun because she was under extreme duress from” a series of stalkers, some of whom had actually been able to get to her. She talked of one in particular who “ambushed” her while she was in her car.

She described the relentless stalking as “psychological warfare” that eventually created a mindset where she was “walking into [her] home expecting an ambush.”